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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
What Tolkien gave us in "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings" is an amalgam of myth, fairy story, heroic legend and still yet another element, truth. He explains, "I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear." Perhaps that is why Tolkien's myths feel so familiar in their foreignness: They tap into a collective, unconscious sense of loss -- loss of the once oral tradition of storytelling and mythmaking -- rekindled in "The Silmarillion" with the epitaphs and purposefully grandiloquent speech of gods, Elves, and Men (believe me, I'd say Women too, but Tolkien so rarely did) in a time before religion (as we know it -- mythmaking was itself a form of religion).
For a work that according to his son became for the elder Tolkien "the vehicle and depository of his profoundest reflections," it is especially sad that "The Silmarillion" was deemed largely impenetrable, even by many Tolkien fans, upon its release in 1977. The extravagantly stylized language, a seeming overabundance of genealogical history, and a lack of deeply crafted characterization were cited as its major faults. (Claims of impenetrability did little to damage the book's sales, though. "The Silmarillion" sold over a million copies that year, soaring to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and it continues to make a positive impression on its publishers' balance sheets today, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. It's a book that everyone wanted but seemingly no one wanted to read all the way through.)
Negative reactions were, alas, nothing new to Tolkien's works of fantasy. In 1956, modernist critic Edmund Wilson famously scoffed at "The Lord of the Rings," calling it "juvenile trash." In 1961, Philip Toynbee prematurely celebrated the fact that Tolkien's "childish" books "have passed into a merciful oblivion." In a sense, "The Silmarillion" drew criticism for not being trashy or juvenile enough.
A review in the September 1977 issue of the Economist was so virulently dismissive of "The Silmarillion" that it required a seemingly palliative preface directed at Tolkien enthusiasts, acknowledging that those readers would "have little sympathy with the 'curmudgeonly' note of the following article by one of our reviewers." (The editors then revealed that they published the review "in the interests of provoking further disagreement between those who live outside the Tolkien world and those inside it.")
The great chasm between those wholly taken with Tolkien and those who avoid his works of fantasy like a medieval plague has always been as unbridgeable as, say, the abyss at Khazad-dûm into which Gandalf and the fiery Balrog fall. Yet much of the criticism originally directed at "The Silmarillion" singles out Tolkien's liberal sampling of European lore as well as his reluctance to flesh out his characters beyond their heroic (or villainous) archetypes. But isn't the creation of archetypes the greater part of what mythmaking is all about? I am no Oxford medievalist, but it seems to me that creating enduring types to which succeeding generations can attach new significance is a success, not a failure.
John Gardner -- the author of "Grendel," and who, like Tolkien, was a noted professor of medieval literature and a scholar of ancient languages -- reviewed "The Silmarillion" for the New York Times upon its release in 1977. He wrote, "If 'The Hobbit' is a lesser work than the Ring trilogy because it lacks the trilogy's high seriousness, the collection that makes up 'The Silmarillion' stands below the trilogy because much of it contains only high seriousness; that is, here Tolkien cares much more about the meaning and coherence of his myth than he does about these glories of the trilogy: rich characterization, imagistic brilliance, powerfully imagined and detailed sense of place, and thrilling adventure." A lover of languages, Gardner had none for his fellow scholar: "Tolkien's language is the same phony Prince Valiant language of the worst Everyman translations and modernizations."
These are fair criticisms, if a bit stuffy -- but to be fair, Gardner's review is not wholly damning; he does have (tempered) praise for "the total vision, the eccentric heroism of Tolkien's attempt," which is certainly a large part of its importance. While I agree with Gardner that "The Silmarillion," and its forest of names denser than Fangorn, might not make for the simplest reading immediately after finishing the last bit of your Longbottom Leaf, I do think that there is something more primal, more vital -- and more pagan than papal -- to its appeal. (Yes, Tolkien was a Christian, but the myths he imagined here are intended as fundamentally pre-Christian.)
Sure, there are certain interminable portions that read much like those sections in the Bible where W begat X, who begat Y and Z, and some stories are given inexplicably short shrift. But that only reminds me of something else Gardner said (though not in that Times review): "Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when he's good, nobody can touch him." The same is true for Tolkien and "The Silmarillion" (and no, I'm not comparing Tolkien to any manner of Supreme Being, though the most fervent of Tolkienians might wish me to).
Despite its complexity, "The Silmarillion" has at its core the simple, cyclical story of a fall -- a great fall, with many smaller ones within. Tolkien himself said, "There cannot be any 'story' without a fall -- all stories are ultimately about the fall -- at least not for human minds as we know them and have them." Its story arc is one suffused with loss and bereavement, tracking the gradual darkening of the original light of the world; things are created, then marred or destroyed, then are re-created, but with less luster -- lights shine with less brilliance, men act with less virtue -- as things grow further away from their original perfection. The one bright thought that remains with the reader throughout is the comforting knowledge that the time of "The Lord of the Rings" is still to come.
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